Macao, Apr. 20.
Macao is the most restful place in China." By a restful place Li mean a place where a man can be wholly inactive, not even think, without his conscience trotibling him. In Macao I could go gracefully to seed without a qualm. There are lots of places in China whither people go bent upon doing nothing, but in nine out of ten of these places they find that something in the atmosphere drives them to active diversion rather than passive rest. They go for the air, or the water, or the temperature which stimulates and they get it. They climb, or ride, or swim, or row with the same energetic devation that they put into their desk work 11 months or more out of the year and they feel as guilty if they fail to do something of the sort on a vacation as a salaried man who lies in bed till noon on a Monday morning.
Not so' Macao; by a strange moral inversion, a duty neglected in Macao gives one the same pleasant spiritual after-taste as a duty performed elsewhere. That is what I call restful. The atmosphere is not recuperative, it does not stimulate your faculties or hurry you back to your routine, grind with a new eagerness to do something and a sharpened sense of duty as most "rest" places do; it does not drive you to be "fit," but permits you to become unfit without remorse. It is anaesthesia to all that makes the Anglo-Saxon at once happy and miserable. His physical energy and his troublesome sense of right and wrong go into a twilight sleep here; and here he could sit with his back to a sun-warmed—stucco wall smoking cigarettes, patting an elsewhere disgraceful corpulence and watching the seven deadly sins flourish picturesquely, as they do in Macao, with benign tolerance. The man who would feel impelled by conscience "to do something" in Macao would. be capable of deep breathing before an open window 365 mornings out of a_ year, or of vregilating his diet by calories and _vitamines. He would be the kind of a man who delighted as_a small boy in wearing the clothes in which his mother arrayed him on a Sunday morning, who liked school, who was Sunday School superintendent at the age of 17, who gan hoarding his pennies at the age of three and owned a block of city real estate before he was 30. In other words he wouldn't be quite human, and probably would never see Macao.
Tar Escapp or Opyssevs.
You may think that your correspondent is belying the atmosphere which he describes by reacting to duty and pounding a typewriter for your benefit in this setting of blue sca and green banyans, where church and castle-crowned hills throw benign shadows upon streets of fan-tan houses and opium shops, where the incense of many ancient and pious shrines, the smoke of- joss sticks from heathen altars, the fumes of a thousand opium pipes, the reek of unclean-lines from countless gambling houses and brothels, together with a general aroma of physical and moral decay (not to mention the insistent. exhalations of drying fish) mingle harmoniously and weave themselves, in the yellow evening into a veil of enchantment his ancient and naughty community. This, however, is not a discharge of duty. It is not in discord with the little minor harmony which the community drones. It is simply a lazy man's reflex, like a yawn between naps, or a stroll between meals. In fact the "North-China Daily News" will never realize, nor the world ever know, how narrowly the former missed losing a long-winded commentator' on Chinese political futilities while the latter gained a lily of the field devoted for the rest of his days to the occasional (and very oceasiona) at that) creation of such flippancies as he is now perpetrating. As it happened, for better or for worse, as it is the custom to say when all precedent indicates that it is for worse, booked a passage out of Macao within an hour of my arrival, limiting my sojourn to 27 hours, before I had walked the sea wall under the banyans by starlight or seen the sun rise on the fishing fleets and the pirate islands.
Worse still, I had written from the outside world, where to the great misery of mankind business business, to Mr. Tang Shao-yi who lives 16 miles up the coast from Macao, that I was coming to see him on a Wednesday; and as my day in Macao was a Thursday and for all I knew business might be business in Tangkiawan, I had to remove myself from the spell of Macao for eight hours out of the scant 97. As a matter of fact, so far as atiresphere went, it was only a move out of the frying pan into the fire, a migration from the kingdom of the poppy enters to the kingdom of the lotus eaters. But in Tangkiawan the exigencies of a crude world again intruded. I had borrowed a boat, a big boat with 20 men on it, that goes about the world's business burning I don't know how many tons of coal a day at how many dollars a ton, and I had to return it to Macao by a certain hour. If you are wicked in this world and go on to your merited punishment in the next, you will not find yourself paddling around in brimstone, if the arbiter of your ruined destinies is as ingenious as I should be in his position; you; will find yourself in some place like!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.